Devil’s Den A Movie A Day Journal Entry

Devil’s Den (2006) – A Movie A Day 2021 #6

Devil’s Den DVD cover

Have you ever wanted to watch From Dusk till Dawn, but didn’t really want to watch From Dusk till Dawn? Then Devil’s Den might be just the movie for you!

Devil’s Den is a fun little horror comedy heavily inspired by From Dusk till Dawn. It’s so inspired by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’ masterful mashup of crime and vampires, that Devil’s Den has to go out of its way to explain how the not-vampire strippers in its movie are different from the totally-vampire strippers that inhabit the Titty Twister. But let me back up a bit. 

Devil’s Den stars Kelly Hu, Ken Foree, and Devon Sawa. We first meet Sawa’s character, Quinn, as he’s driving back from Mexico with a suitcase full of Spanish Fly in the back set and his best friend, Nick, in the passenger seat. After a semi-lengthy yet entertaining conversation where Nick doubts the effectiveness of their cache of drugs, Quinn decides the best course of action is to prove the Spanish Fly’s effectiveness by drugging some strippers with the pills and reaping the rewards. This, my friends, is our hero of the story. Well, sort of. Quinn’s role as main character is taken over by two much more likable characters we meet in shortly after this opening scene. 

Quinn and Nick pull into a strip club named Devil’s Den, and as they scope out the place for two victims, two other people are scoping out the place for reasons that remain a mystery until later in the movie. One of those people is Leonard, played by Ken Foree, and the other is Caitlin, played by Kelly Hu. Both Leonard and Caitlin are sitting alone at separate tables, and they’re not there for the beers or the breasts. They’re both looking for something or someone, but they don’t begin to reveal their true intentions until Quinn’s plan goes awry. 

Quinn slips a pill into one of the dancer’s drinks, and at first the Spanish Fly seems to be working. The drugged dancer, Jezebel, played by Dawn Olivieri, becomes aggressive in her requests to take Quinn to a secluded area for a “private dance.” Quinn, of course, is thrilled, and he’s led down a hallway and out the back door of the building. Quinn starts to get nervous, and rightfully so, because Jezebel has gotten so worked up by the Spanish Fly that she can’t control herself anymore. Jezebel reveals her true monstrous face as she claws at Quinn and bites at his neck. Luckily for Quinn, Caitlin was following him and Jezebel, and even luckier for Quinn, Caitlin has two pistols that she unloads into Jezebel.

When Caitlin and Quinn make it back into the Devil’s Den, all hell has broken loose. The strippers have all turned into what I assumed were vampires, and they are tearing the customers apart. The only person besides Caitlin who knows how to fight is Leonard, and he’s swinging a katana around, chopping off heads left and right.

So that’s the setup, two criminals stop at a strip club that’s infested with stripper-monsters, and everyone who survives the initial massacre has to band together in order to survive. Sounds a lot like From Dusk till Dawn, right? Well it’s totally different, because Leonard explains that the strippers aren’t vampires, they’re ghouls. They’re not trying to drink blood, they’re trying to eat flesh. So yeah, totally different. 

I’m just having a bit of fun with the plot though. I actually did enjoy Devil’s Den, and beyond the basic setup, the movie is pretty different as it goes on. We learn about who Caitlin and Leonard are and why they’re there, and the star power of Kelly Hu and Ken Foree absolutely helped sell me on the goofiness of the story. I immediately liked then, but I never got to where I liked Quinn. He is a whiney, selfish douche who got into the whole mess by trying to drug a woman and take advantage of her. He has a bit of a redemption arc, but by that point in the movie I was hoping for a random ghoul attack to take him out. But two out of three isn’t bad, and Caitlin and Leonard (and there ridiculous backgrounds) more than made up for Quinn. 

Plus, you know, stripper monsters are pretty much always fun. Sure, it’s a bit of a rip-off of From Dusk till Dawn, but I don’t care. A fun movie is a fun movie even if I’ve kind of seen it before. Also, as I understand it, Zoe Bell doubles for one of the ghouls who has an extended fight scene with Kelly Hu, and that is super fun to watch. So yeah, I’d recommend Devil’s Den for people who enjoy silly horror movies with a fair amount of blood and boobs. 

Devil’s Den – Trailer from Ken Ohara on Vimeo.

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Decoys 2: Alien Seduction A Movie A Day Journal Entry

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction (2007) – A Movie A Day 2021 #2

Decoys 2 DVD Case
Decoys 2: The Second Seduction DVD case

Even in the world of online streaming everything, I’m still hooked on physical media. As part of my unfortunate addiction to outdated formats, I make regular trips to used movie stores like Movie Trading Company. On every visit I’ll be sure to check out the $0.99 DVD table, and almost every time I’m done pawing through the rows of forgotten and unwanted dics I’ll come away with a stack of cheap entertainment. It’s like a treasure hunt, though I admit I do have to be very generous with my definition of “treasure” in most cases. Still, over my years of bargain-bin shopping I’ve found some movies I love that I would probably have never given a chance otherwise.

For example, if I had seen Decoys 2: Alien Seduction on any of the streaming services I frequent, chances are I wouldn’t have clicked on it. It might have been added to one of my endless queues where it would have existed until it either got dropped from the service or I cancelled my account, but with so many choices available online there’s not a great chance that it would have piqued my interest enough to devote an evening to it. But, on a shopping trip yesterday, Decoys 2: Alien Seduction did pique my interest enough to pay ninety-nine cents plus tax for it, and it even topped the short stack of DVDs I arrived home with. There’s just something about having a physical disc in my hands that makes me feel almost obligated to watch it with undivided attention. So, long story long, last night I watched Decoys 2: Alien Seduction. So was it a successful treasure hunt? Do I love the movie? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction (also known as Decoys 2: The Second Seduction according to the DVD I now proudly own) is a Canadian sci-fi monster comedy about a group of horny college guys who create a contest to sleep with the most women over a certain amount of time. I seem to remember the contest’s time frame being like two or three days, but I could be misremembering that, and it’s not important anyway. While the guys are preparing to prey on the hapless females of their university, there is a group of female aliens on campus who need to find virile men to seduce so they can impregnate the men with their alien spawn. Unfortunately for the guys, the process of impregnation involves a rapid bodily temperature drop that tends to kill the victim (hence the need for virility so they can survive the process). Why is there a temperature drop? It has something to do with the aliens being from a very cold planet. The aliens’ frigid planetary origins also explain their one major weakness: they’re allergic to heat. Oh yeah, and the aliens are all disguising themselves as beautiful women, and they can read minds and change their clothes to mimic any man’s fantasy. So with all of that in place, hilarity ensues. Well, something like hilarity ensues.

If I had to describe Decoys 2: Alien Seduction somewhat succinctly, the movie is an attempt at making an eighties sex comedy crossed with a late nineties sci-fi movie in the vein of Species, but filtered through the budget-conscious lens of an early Syfy Channel original movie (it’s not a Syfy movie, but it sure does feel a lot like one). Everything is done in an intentionally campy way, which, given the budget and the premise, was a wise decision. It’s a silly movie designed to get a few laughs, show a few breasts, and then roll the closing credits before it overstays its welcome. For what it set out to accomplish, I think Decoys 2: Alien Seduction did a fine job.

Though most of the comedy was just okay, I did smile a few times, and though they teased more nudity than they actually showed, I still found myself not regretting my decision to watch the movie. And I’m glad I stuck around until the end, because you do get to see the aliens in their true forms a lot more as the main group of guys (and one female friend who has of course been pining over the not-quite-so-scummy member of the group) hunts down the beings that have been killing their friends. I really enjoyed the designs of the monsters (again, think Species), and even though they didn’t have the budget to make the aliens very mobile in wider shots, the action was goofy and fun in a cheap sci-fi way. There were also some digital effects that looked okay for the era and budget, and overall the action/sci-fi portion of the movie was entertaining. 

There is also a bit of star power in Decoys 2: Alien Seduction. Tobin Bell and Dina Meyer, both involved in the ongoing Saw series at the time this movie was released, make appearances as a professor and a doctor respectively. Tobin Bell looked like he might have been able to show up for one or two days to shoot out all of his scenes, but Dine Meyer played a fairly important role throughout the whole movie. She was even included in the climactic battle at the very end of everything. 

And I suppose the only other thing that bears mentioning is the plot itself. I enjoyed the obvious role reversal of the predatory males being preyed upon by females who shove phallic alien tentacles into the guys’ bodies. It’s not super clever, but it doesn’t need to be. It works, and, as ridiculous as it is, it drives the plot forward. So yeah, I enjoyed Decoys 2: Alien Seduction enough to pay ninety-nine cents for it. Someday I might even watch the first Decoys… but only if I find it in a bargain bin somewhere.

 

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Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare A Movie A Day Journal Entry

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare – A Movie A Day #91

This movie. Oh man. What do I say about Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare?

Well, for one thing, I’ll be saying a lot about this movie on the podcast I do (called The Last Theater). My best friend Joey and I watched this in preparation for that show. The show will go up sometime in April, and it’s part of a retrospective we’re doing on the entire A Nightmare on Elm Street series. Freddy’s Dead, as the sixth movie in the series, will be episode number six out of ten. So, check though out for some lengthy thoughts, but here are a few brief thoughts that may or may not make it onto the episode.

Joey and I had both seen Freddy’s Dead before, and neither of us had super great thoughts about it. I think Joey thought a lot better of it than I did though. I mostly remembered the cameos, one of the death scenes, and the horrendous 3-D section of the movie. I can usually take or leave 3-D, even in modern movies. It works well for blockbusters like Star Wars or a lot of big comic book movies, but for the most part, I have no preference about watching something in 3-D or not.  Thankfully the blu-ray release of Freddy’s Dead that we each have doesn’t have 3-D capability, but unfortunately, the filmmakers decided to be extremely obnoxious about how they incorporated the 3-D effects into the movie. I won’t go into detail here (because this will be a teaser to go listen to The Last Theater), but yeah, I hate the 3-D in this movie. This is the movie I cite as an example every time I talk about terrible uses of the third dimension. This and the yo-yo from Friday the 13th Part 3. But at least Friday 3 had a fun/dumb theme song.

Freddy’s Dead is not very good. There are fun parts to it, and Robert Englund is great as always, but it leans hard into the campiness that had grown throughout the series. It definitely had potential with the basic story, and I think that’s what makes it even more frustrating for me. Freddy’s Dead could have been really scary, but it just lets me down at every turn. But hey, at least it was fun watching it with Joey on his birthday.

Is it my least favorite in the franchise? I don’t know. I guess you’ll have to listen to episode 10 of out Nightmare franchise retrospective over at The Last Theater. That will be our wrap-up episode where we talk about the series as a whole and rank the movies in order of preference.

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The Sonata A Movie A Day Journal Entry

The Sonata – A Movie A Day #87

The Sonata came out on DVD recently, so this was one of the rentals I picked up during my weekly trip to the video store. I didn’t know anything about it, but it was new and the cover promised a spooky time, so I was sold.

The Sonata is about a young woman named Rose who was a prodigy violin player. Her career is coming to a turning point when she gets news that he estranged father, one of the greatest and most mysterious modern composers, has died. Rose inherits her father’s house, and when she goes there to stay for a while and decide what to do, she discovers a strange sonata written by father and locked away for Rose to discover for herself. Rose and her manager try to figure out what the strange music notes and symbols mean, but as they unravel the mystery, dark things begin to happen in the house.

I mostly enjoyed The Sonata. I quite enjoyed the mystery part of the movie. As the characters learn more about Rose’s father (played by Rutger Hauer who has some short bit of screen time here and there), we are treated to a mystical riddle that delves into witchcraft and demonology. The movie gets pretty dark at times when we learn what Rose’s father was doing alone in his house, but some of the big reveals at the end weren’t super great. This was a lower-budget movie, and I think they should have tried to figure out ways to get around having and computer generated effects. The CGI wasn’t great, and I do think it detracted from y enjoyment towards the end. Up to that point though, I thought it was pretty good. Plus, I liked the idea of the ending.

So, The Sonata isn’t great, but it’s good. It’s worth a watch for people who are really into haunted house movies with a heavy emphasis on the mystery side of things. 

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The Devil Bat A Movie A Day Journal Entry

The Devil Bat – A Movie A Day #82

I was in a bit of a time crunch when I was picking a movie to watch on this day, so I started looking for something a bit shorter than the average ninety minute feature. Older genre movies can often be shorter, so I decided to watch The Devil Bat. Released in 1940, The Devil Bat stars the legendary Bela Lugosi and has a run time of a little over an hour. That was perfect.

I wasn’t sure if I’d seen The Devil Bat before, and even though some scenes seemed familiar, I really didn’t recognize large parts of the movie. So, I’m treating it as a new movie as far as my “A Movie A Day” challenge goes.

While it’s not Lugosi’s best movie, I liked The Devil Bat well enough. Lugosi stars as a mad scientist who seeks revenge on people he thinks have cheated him. His plan is to send his genetically altered giant bat to kill his enemies by using a potion that attracts the bat by scent. His plan works for a while, but of course his actions catch up to him as the police become wise to his murdering ways.

It’s a simple movie, and it gets pretty repetitive even for it’s short run time, but I enjoyed it.

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Rabid (2019) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

Rabid (2019) – A Movie A Day #79

I had heard mixed things about this remake of David Cronenberg’s 1977 movie of the same name, but I ended up renting it after all the brand new movies for the week had been checked out (yes, I still rent physical media). So Rabid might have been a backup plan for the night, but it’s not like I didn’t want to see it. I usually enjoy body horror quite a lot, and the movie looked promising. I’d heard of the the directors of this new version of Rabid, the Soska Sisters, but the only movie I’d previously seen of theirs was See No Evil 2. It was fine. But really, one movie isn’t enough to really know what a director’s films are like. So, I didn’t know much about what to expect from Rabid.

Rabid is about a woman, Rose, who works for a fashion designer, but she dreams of being a designer herself. Rose keeps to herself and lacks confidence in all aspects of her life. After a night where her confidence is built up only to be shattered by people close to her, she suffers an accident that leaves her disfigured. After deciding to undergo an experimental operation, Rose’s body and face are better than ever, but there are some side effects. Rose develops some unusual cravings, and people that come into close contact with her eventually turn into violent, raving (i.e. rabid) maniacs. 

The movie really focuses on Rose and her experience rather than the violent murders happening throughout the city. I liked that part about it, but overall I thought it was just okay. As the body horror aspect of the movie increased later in the film, it started to look a little silly at times. A lot of the effects were good, but some important ones weren’t. I also thought there was great potential for some strong commentary from a female perspective, but that part felt like it took a backseat to the plot and all the blood. It was an okay balance, but again, it was just okay. It felt like it wanted to be a cross between Raw and The Neon Demon, but it ended up feeling more like a pretty good low-budget gore movie.

There were some memorable bits for me though. Phil Brooks (CM Punk) was in the movie, and seeing him so on a maniacal rage and just face-first through a window was pretty great. Also, Brooks’s wife, AJ Mendez Brooks, showed up late in the movie as a catty fashion model. That was fun. And I did enjoy most of the movie. I just don’t think I’ll be seeing it again.

I thought I had seen David Cronenberg’s original, but watching this version, I realize I hadn’t. That’s something I’ll need to remedy soon.

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Diecovery A Movie A Day Journal Entry

Diecovery – A Movie A Day #78

Diecovery is a low-budget supernatural horror movie from Thailand in 2003. I picked it up a while ago in a 2-DVD pack along with another Thai horror movie, Taxi Tonight. Neither movie looked particularly good when I bought them, but I really enjoy getting cheap, multi-disc movie packs. Most of the movies you’ll get in these packs are decent yet forgettable, but occasionally you’ll come across some real gems. Diecovery is not one of those gems, but I liked it fine.

The title aside (which I don’t like at all), Diecovery feels like a nice homemade horror movie. It’s like something my friends and I might have done over a weekend when I was younger. By that, I mean that there are nice ideas, but a lack of budget and experience kept the movie from ever really rising above the many, many other cheaply made horror movies out there.

The story follows a young married couple as they take a delayed honeymoon away from the big city. They go to a resort in the “wilderness” of Thailand (I put that in quotes because they are in the woods, but they’re barely outside the city). The resort holds a dark secret though. Years earlier, a woman was killed and buried on the grounds by the resort’s owners. The specific details around her death and its cover-up are unraveled as the mystery unfolds, but the end result is that the resort is cursed. That leads to supernatural happenings (and a few natural happenings) that get more and more sinister.

It’s a ghost story in the vein of The Grudge or many other vengeful spirit movies. So yeah, I liked the ideas, but what actually made it to the screen sometimes comes across pretty silly. The woman’s death is confusingly edited, and it’s abundantly clear that her dead body is a very floppy dummy. There are some computer effects that look real janky. The acting is mostly about the quality you’d expect from something so cheap, but you know, I did think the two lead characters were engaging. They worked well as a couple, and I enjoyed watching them. That, plus the fact that the ghost (when she finally showed up) looked pretty cool is about all I really need. 

Diecovery isn’t great, but I had some fun with it. I’d watch it again.

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Demons A Movie A Day Journal Entry (with introduction)

An Introduction

I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided to try to start blogging about all the movies I’m watching for my A Movie A Day challenge. Naturally I’ll need to keep them fairly brief since I’ll hopefully doing at least one every day, so I’m going to treat these more as personal journal entries rather than straight-up reviews. That means these will be completely subjective musings about my personal experiences while attempting to watch at least 366 movies in 2020. That will also allow me to blog about the same movie more than once without just posting the exact same thing when I inevitably watch the same movie over and over again. I might be watching the same movie, but the experience will always be unique. That’s good, because the very first experience I’ll be writing about involves a movie that I’ve seen bunches of times and will see bunches more!

Demons – A Movie A Day #77

March is my birth month, and even though my actual birthday is closer to the end of the month than the beginning, I wanted to start with a movie I knew I’d love. It was also the Sunday night before another long work week, and that was just one more reason to start it off right. For me, a good start will always involve Italian horror, the 80s, movies, demons, and lots of gore. Lamberto Bava’s Demons has all of those things in beautiful excess.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Demons, but the number is pretty high. There are definitely other movies I’ve seen more often (The Evil Dead, and The Crow being tops in my rewatch list), but I’ve seen Demons enough to know the music cues and sparse dialogue by heart. As many times as I’ve seen it, it never gets old.

The movie is about a group of people who get magically trapped inside a movie theater while watching a film about people getting infected with some sort of demonic curse that causes them to attack and infect everyone around them. With life imitating art, the people in the theater also get infected and attack each other, turning more and more of the theater-goers into grotesque monsters. It’s essentially The Evil Dead, only it’s in a movie theater rather than a cabin in the woods. Plus, with more characters than Sam Raimi’s masterpiece, the blood and gore flow more freely and frequently. Well, I suppose that’s an arguable point, but regardless, Demons is really, really bloody.

Another reason I wanted to watch Demons is because I’ve been thinking about covering some Italian horror movies for my podcast/web site The Last Theater. I’ve been trying to decide which movies I want to start with, and I’ve been circling around Demons and some other films that have strong connections to it. For one thing, the director, Lamberto Bava, is the son of great Italian director Mario Bava. Lamberto Bava worked as an assistant director on some of his father’s films, and he worked in the same role on a couple movies I’ve wanted to cover for a long time: Cannibal Holocaust and Tenebrae.

Also, there’s another great director I’ve been wanting to talk about on The Last Theater, and he’s actually an actor in Demons. Michele Soavi directed a trio of fantastic movies between 1987 and 1994, and I’ve been thinking of doing some sort of director’s spotlight on him. In Demons, Soavi plays a mysterious man wearing what looks like a chrome Phantom of the Opera mask. I actually just learned that recently, so I wanted to watch the movie again knowing that Soavi is in it.

There’s so much to love about Demons, and I love that I’m still learning more about after so many years of watching and rewatching it. I love it, and it was a great way to start the month.

 

 

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